Tsunami videos made Japan's disaster a global event

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Mao Takahashi recorded moment tsunami struck his home town of Ishinomaki

Teenager's video watched over two million times on YouTube

Amount of footage of last year's disaster made it more comprehensible for people across the world

A blue car rushes by in the raging brown water. Moments later a whole family house is carried down the center of the flooded street before an even more frightening sight: a young man trapped in the rising water clinging to a telephone wire.

"Gambatte kudasai!" screams out a young voice to the stranded victim, which means "stay strong" in Japanese.

That voice belongs to 16 year old Mao Takahashi, who used his camera to record the moment the tsunami struck his neighborhood in Ishinomaki, Japan, on March 11, 2011.

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"I was simply panicking," he explained.

In Japan every person in the country has at least one mobile phone and when the tsunami tore across northern Japan, thousands like Takahashi pulled out a device from their pockets and started filming, making last year's disaster one of the most recorded in history.

"Because you had all of this very real footage, it made the incident much more real in people's minds. They no longer have to imagine what a tsunami is, they saw it live," said Tokyo-based technology consultant Steve Nagata.

Nagata points out that Japan is recognizable to many people, even if they haven't visited the country. That familiarity helped people around the world connect to the disaster.

The personal nature of the video also brought the disaster home to people around the world and compelled nations and individuals to engage and want to help, said Nagata.

"To be able to do this in near real time and to do it to audiences across the globe is unprecedented in how much power it's giving to individuals," Nagata said.

In Takahashi's case, what his video doesn't show when he stopped recording is the most important part of his story.

Takahashi took off his clothes, fearing their weight when they got wet and waded into the frigid waters, which had subsided as the tsunami retreated. He then grabbed the young man clinging to the telephone wire -- who was just a few years older than himself -- and carried him back into his house.

He doesn't know what happened to the young man, other than he survived.

Takahashi and his family are now living in temporary housing and their future is still uncertain; he doesn't know where they will finally end up. He still likes to look at the video that's still on his camera, even though it shows the fury of that traumatizing day.